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Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. He considered his work to be an authentic "return to Freud", in opposition to ego psychology. This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualised as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical theory.

Lacan's work has had a profound impact on the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. Within the Lacanian community itself a number of different schools have emerged, particularly in France, but the vast majority of practitioners fall under the auspices of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, headed by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. Outside Europe, Lacanian psychoanalysis has gained particular prominence in the USA, Brazil and Argentina.

Career

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialised in psychiatry from 1926. He undertook his own analysis around this time with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals of the time: he was a friend of André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, and attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. Several of his articles were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and he was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his studies he had a particular interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and, alongside many other Parisian intellectuals of the time, he also attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève.

Lacan presented his first analytic paper on the "Mirror Phase" at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the end of the war Lacan visited England for a five week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was much influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups (in France, cartels) as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

In 1951 Lacan started to hold a weekly seminar at the St-Anne Hospital Paris, urging what he described as ‘a return to Freud’ and, in particular, to Freud’s concentration upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, the seminars drew large crowds and continued for nearly thirty years.

Lacan was a member of the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), which was a member body of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1953, after a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the SPP to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One of the consequences of this move was to deprive the new group of membership within the IPA. In the following years a complex process of negotiation was to take place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice, with his controversial innovation of variable-length sessions, and the critical stance he took towards much of the accepted orthodoxy of psychoanalytic theory and practice led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that the registration of the SFP was dependent upon Lacan being removed from the list of training analysts with the organisation. Lacan refused such a condition and left the SFP to form his own school which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). Leaving the St-Anne Hospital where he had delivered his seminar up to this point Lacan began to give it instead at the elite higher education establishment the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students.

Many students of Lacan became important psychoanalysts and/or wrote influential contributions to philosophy and other fields. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques-Alain Miller, Luce Irigaray, Jean Laplanche, and even Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, all attended Lacan's seminars at some point. Lacan's first seminar in 1964 was later published in English as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Lacan continued to deliver his public exposition of analytic theory and practice for the next seventeen years.

The 'Return to Freud'

Following Freud's death, psychoanalytic practice split into many differing schools of thought. Against the backdrop of these divergent currents of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan called for a 'return to Freud'. Lacan accused later psychoanalysts of a superficial understanding of Freud (who encountered a similar problem himself on his first trip to North America, where his interpreters appeared to have "sugar-coated" his theories to make them more popular to the masses), claiming they had so cautiously adhered to his ideas that they had served to block rather than to induce scientific investigation of the mental process. Lacan wanted to return to Freud's thought, and expand it in light of its own tensions and currents. In fact, near the end of his life he remarked to a conference, "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian."

It should be emphasised that Lacan insisted that his work was not, in his eyes, an interpretation but a translation of Freud into structural-linguistic terms. Freud's ideas of 'slips of the tongue', jokes and suchlike – Lacan insisted – all emphasised the agency of language in subjective constitution, such that had Freud lived contemporaneously with Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and, principally, had Freud been aware of the work of Saussure, he would have done the same as him. In his famous essay "Freud and Lacan", the structuralist Louis Althusser makes this point particularly well:

"In his first great work The Interpretation of Dreams Freud studied the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘laws’ of dreams, reducing their variants to two: displacement and condensation. Lacan recognized these as two essential figures of speech, called in linguistics * Hence the most important acquisitions of de Saussure and of the linguistics that descends from him began to play a justified part in the understanding of the process of the unconscious as well as that of the verbal discourse of the subject and of their inter-relationship, i.e. of their identical relation and non-relation in other words, of their reduplication and dislocation (décalage)." (Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 191 – 192.

The 'return to Freud', therefore, is primarily the realisation that the pervading agency of the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where, for example, the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified, ultimately resulting in Lack. It is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within. As Malcolm Bowie puts it:

"For Lacan, Freud's central insight was not * that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure, that this structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do, and that in thus betraying itself it becomes accessible to analysis". (Malcolm Bowie, 'Jacques Lacan' in John Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 118).

(The 'return to Freud' in the full sense of the term, as briefly explained above, begins with his paper "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (Écrits, pp. 161 - 197).) Lacan's principal challenge to Freudian theory is the privilege that it accords to the ego in self-determination. The central pillar of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that "the unconscious is structured like a language". The unconscious, he argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but, rather, a formation every bit as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan argued, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'. In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a challenge to the ego psychology that Freud himself opposed.

Major concepts

The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)

The mirror stage is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience", the first of his Écrits, which remains one of his seminal papers. Some have crudely put this as the point at which the child 'recognises' him- or herself in the mirror image, but this is unfaithful to what Lacan has in mind and also confuses his terminology. Lacan's emphasis here is on the process of identification with an outside image or entity induced through, as he puts it, "insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development" (Lacan, Écrits (rvd. edn., 2002), 'The mirror stage', p. 5).

It is significant that this process of identification is the first step towards the manufacture of the subject because all which follows it – the transition into the Imaginary and the Symbolic order (see below) – is based on this misrecognition (méconnaissance): this is the process that Lacan detects as manifesting itself at every subsequent identification with another person, identity (not to be confused with 'identification') or suchlike throughout the subject's life. This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the Other. What is also occasionally overlooked (especially by those writers who accuse Lacan of outright fabrication – see below) is the experiential basis of Lacan's early paper. As one writer has observed:

"To evidence concerning the role of the other in childhood – the situation known as "transitivism," for instance, where the child will impute his own actions to another – Lacan adds evidence from animal biology, where it has been experimentally shown that a perceptual relationship to another of the same species is necessary in the normal maturing process. Without the visual presence of others, the maturing process is delayed, although it can be restored to a more nearly normal tempo by placing a mirror in the animal’s cage." (Anthony Wilden, "Lacan and the discourse of the Other" in Lacan, The Language of the Self: the Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 159 – 160.)

The Other

In contrast to the dominant Anglo-American ego-psychologists of his time, Lacan considered the self as something constituted in the "Other", that is, the conception of the external. This belief is rooted in Lacan's reading of Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralism, and more specifically his belief that Freud's concept of the unconscious prefigured structuralist linguistics. Lacan picks up on Saussure's observation that a signifier is distinguished and identified through its difference from other signifiers. (For example, "love" is understandable, in part, only through its opposition to "hate," which is in turn understandable only in relationship to "love") As a result, language is never completely contained - it always contains things beyond what is intended, and these things form an endless chain of signifiers. This signifying chain, and more broadly the ordering structures of language in general constitute the Other (always capitalized in Lacan's work).

The existence of the Other forces an unavoidable disconnect between the ego and its desire, which is the source of the psychoanalytic symptoms. Lacan does not believe in the possibility of a "cure" in the sense of removing all symptoms, since the ordering structure of language cannot be avoided, and so the Other will always be present. Instead, one can hope at best to alter one's symptoms, or, as Slavoj Zizek would have it, the mandate to "enjoy your symptom."

The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic

Lacan also formulated the concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which he used to describe the elements of the psychic structure.

The Imaginary constitutes Lacan's version of the ego - the structured conception of identity, beginning with the mirror stage. The imaginary depends on a division between self and "other," but this division already relies on reference to the Other.

The Other, in this triad, is contained in the Symbolic - the ordering structures of language and grammar in which the Imaginary self-formulates.

All of this is coupled with the Real - the world as it exists before the mediation of language. The Real, therefore, can never truly be grasped or engaged with - it is continually mediated through the imaginary and the symbolic. Lacan's notion of the Real is a very difficult concept which he, in his later years, worked to present in a structured, set-theory fashion, as mathemes.

Other important concepts

Writings and seminars

Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, he made his most significant contributions not in the traditional form of books and journal articles, but through seminar lectures - in fact, he explicitly disclaimed publication in his later life. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, conducted over a period of more than two decades, contains the majority of his life's work, though several of these remain unpublished. Furthermore, the accuracy of the transcriptions of the seminars is disputed, with Sherry Turkle claiming that Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law, made extensive changes to add clarity to the material (Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, p. 254-255).

His only major body of writing, Écrits, is notoriously difficult to read. Seminar XX remarks that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Part of the reason for this, it should be emphasised, are the repeated Hegelian allusions (themselves derived from Kojève's lectures on Hegel, which Lacan attended) and similar unheralded theoretical divergences and not, first and foremost, Lacan's obscure prose style, as some have alleged.

Lacan and his discontents

Although Lacan is often associated with it, he was not without his critics from within the major figures of what is broadly termed postmodernism. (Several writers, such as Slavoj Žižek, have argued specifically against considering Lacan a poststructuralist theorist.) Along these lines, Jacques Derrida (though Derrida did not endorse nor associate himself with postmodernism) made a considerable critique of Lacan's analytic writings, accusing him of taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis, but this is hardly surprising. In particular, Derrida criticises Lacanian theory for an inherited Freudian phallocentrism, exemplified primarily in his conception of the phallus as the 'primary signifier' that determines the social order of signifiers. It could be said that much of Derrida's critique of Lacan stems from his relationship with Freud: for example, Derrida deconstructs the Freudian conception of "penis envy", upon which female subjectivity is determined as an absence, to show that the primacy of the male phallus entails a hierarchy between phallic presence and absence that ultimately implodes upon itself.

Nonetheless, Lacan can be said to enjoy an awkward relationship with feminism and post-feminism in that, while he is much criticised for adopting (or inheriting from Freud) a phallocentric stance within his psychoanalytic theories, he is also taken by many to provide an accurate portrayal of the gender biases within society. Some critics accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop, have offered readings of Lacan's work that opened up new possibilities for feminist theory, making it difficult to seriously reject Lacan wholesale due to sexism - although specific parts of his work may well subject to criticism on these grounds. In either case, traditional feminism has profited from Lacan's accounts to show that society has an inherent sexual bias that denigratingly reduces womanhood to a status of deficiency.

Critics from outside psychoanalysis, critical theory and the humanities have often dismissed Lacan and his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish". Noam Chomsky described Lacan as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of "superfical erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand (e.g., confusing irrational and imaginary numbers). Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism on the basis of Sokal's misunderstanding of Lacan's texts. According to Lacanians, the dismissal by Sokal and his allies precludes any valid criticism of his theories, and is instead motivated by a desire to "police the boundaries" of what constitutes an appropriate use of scientific terminology.

Sources

Bibliography

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com or Peter Krapp's *referenced above

Works about Lacan's Work and Theory

  • Alain Badiou, "The Formulas of L'Etourdit" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
  • —————, "Lacan and the Pre-Socratics", Lacan Dot Com, 2006.
  • Benvenuto, Bice; Kennedy, Roger, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986, Free Association Books.)
  • Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991). (An introduction.)
  • Dor, Joel, The Clinical Lacan (New York: Other Press, 1999)
  • Dor, Joel, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (New York: Other Press, 2001)
  • Elliott, Anthony and Frosh, Stephen (eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). (A recent overview.)
  • Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
  • Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
  • Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesoty, 2004.
  • Forrester, John, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1985).
  • Fryer, David Ross, The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
  • —————, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
  • Gherovici, Patricia, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003)
  • Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • --, Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2005)
  • Lander, Romulo, Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other (New York: Other Press, 2006)
  • Leupin, Alexandre, Lacan Today (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Mathelin, Catherine, Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano (New York: Other Press, 1999)
  • McGowan, Todd and Kunkle, Sheila, Eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Jacques-Alain Miller, "Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety I " (New York: Lacanian Ink 26, 2005.)
  • —————, "Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
  • —————, "Jacques Lacan's Later Teachings" (New York: Lacanian Ink 21, 2003.)
  • —————, "The Paradigms of Jouissance" (New York, Lacanian Ink 17, 2000.)
  • Moustafa, Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
  • Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd edition, Guildford Press, New York, 1992
  • ————— and Wollheim, Richard, ‘Lacan: an exchange’, New York Review of Books, 26 (9), 1979, p. 44.
  • Soler, Colette, What Lacan Said About Women (New York: Other Press, 2006)
  • Van Haute, Philippe, Against Adaptation: Lacan's "Subversion" of the Subject (New York: Other Press, 2002)
  • -- Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Wilden, Anthony, ‘Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography’, Yale French Studies, 36/37, 1966, pp. 263–268.
  • Slavoj Žižek, "Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to misread Lacan´s formulas of sexuation", Lacan Dot Com, 2005.
  • —————, ‘The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real’, Prose Studies, 11 (3), 1988, pp. 94–120.
  • —————, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).
  • —————, "Jacques Lacan as Reader of Hegel" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)

External links

Introductions

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1901 births | 1981 deaths | 20th century philosophers | Poststructuralism | Psychoanalytic theory | Psychologists | Structuralism | Philosophy of sexuality | Postmodern theory | Psychoanalysts | Lacan

Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | ז'אק לאקאן | Jacques Lacan | ジャック・ラカン | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Marie Emile Lacan | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Lacan | 雅各·拉岡

 

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